144: Pain & Suffering: How can it serve you? - Betsy Pake

144: Pain & Suffering: How can it serve you?

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PODCAST

Episode 144

Todays show I share a little story about changing our trajectory by dreaming without fear and why I think pain can actually serve you and get you to where you want to go!

Transcript:

You’re listening to Episode 144 of The Art of Living big. Alright, so on today’s show I have, I want to talk to you a little bit about suffering, and struggle and pain. But before we do that,

I want to tell you a little story

about

my husband and I, okay, which doesn’t have to do with struggle and pain, although there is some struggle and pain in any kind of marriage. I’m sure of it. Maybe he’ll come on the show. Let’s invite him. Craig, come on the show. And let’s talk about struggle and pain. All right, but so today’s story really quick.

So I am a big huge believer that, as you know that, like anything that you’re actively thinking about anything that is in your subconscious, or like as Abraham Hicks would say, in your vortex, right, so the things that you have been thinking about that you’ve programmed your subconscious to dwell on, or the things that you’re going to bring to you.

And I was last Saturday, Craig had a basketball game to go to at UGA. And you’ve heard me talk about his love of sports before. And he invited me to go with him to the basketball game. And so I went and it’s like, I don’t know, maybe 45 minutes to get to Athens from where we live. So it’s a little bit of a drive. And so I was sort of excited about it.

Because we’ve both been so busy that we haven’t had much of a chance to really talk. So we got in the car, and he was about to put on a podcast. And he said, Do you want me to put on a podcast? Or do you want to talk?

And I was like, let’s talk.

So I have this little thing that Craig and I have done now for a long time. And I’ll offer it to you because maybe you will like this. But

I was feeling

there. You know, there are so many cool things about this show that I really love. And doing this show every week got me through like hard times, you know, when I’ve talked before about my struggling with my daughter last year, and and that is over. But it got me through that right where I had something to show up for. And so I feel like I I love this show.

And I love the people that listen, I’m like so honored, because I know there’s five kajillion different podcasts out there. And so I want this year to have something really cool happen with the show. Like we get a lot of downloads, I think it’s a lot of downloads.

And honestly, like

I used it in the very beginning, I’d get like 20 downloads, but it was 20 people that were listening to my show. And now sometimes it’s up to 10,000 people in a month that listen to the show. And I’m honored by that. And so I want to do something really cool with the show. So I said let’s do let’s dream and talk about what could happen with the show. So the cool thing about this whole process is that the rule

is,

is that nobody’s allowed to poopoo what the

other person says.

So you know, if I say something that I want to have happen, Craig’s not allowed to start coming up with the reasons why that’s not a good idea, or why it might not work, right? So really, the rule is like you can’t spread your doubt all over somebody else. And what ends up happening, because you can’t immediately go to like, oh, but you know, that’s probably not going to happen. Like you can’t go there. So instead, your brain starts to figure out how that could happen.

Okay, so we’re in the car, we’re talking, I’m like, let’s dream no Pooh poohing. He’s like, Okay, cool. I’m like, I want to do cool stuff with the show. And you know, I talk all the time about how I love the beach. But why can’t we have some sort of beach like component to the show? Like, what about, you know, so I start dreaming, and I hesitate to say it out loud. Because why? I guess because it feels a little. Okay, I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna say it out loud. Because maybe you’ll be able to help me Who knows. But it feels a little scary, right to say what you want

out.

But I was like, it would be cool to like, maybe win in the grand scheme of things to be able to go to resorts, and like experience cool resorts do like a review of the resort. So you guys know what, and I would, you know, I would review it in a way that would be so fun. And I could review the resort tell you what’s really good to eat, like all the things that you need to know to have a high vibe experience at the resort. And then I could record the show from there, right?

So the energy of it would be so much better. Not so much, but it would be so cool, right? So this was just a cool thing I wanted to experience and even as I was talking about it, I was getting excited. Now I have no idea how that could happen. No idea. And I’ve wanted other things for the show.

Like I you know, you’ve heard me probably talk about how I really want to have a pen sponsor because I love to write I in with my pens. But like I have a pen sponsor has not presented itself. But anyway, so we’re in the car, we’re talking, I’m going through this whole thing. And he starts thinking of like different ideas of how could that happen and what could happen?

And I mean, we’re into it like, I mean, 1015 minutes, like what this could be like, and how could we ease into that? Right? So like, the next thing was, well, what if we’re not asking for anything, we just want to be able to review it. So we want to reach out to places before we go and say, What are the things we need to experience so that we can give the best review of your resort?

Right? So we’re not even asking, I’m not asking for something for free. I’m, I want to have the best experience and I want to be able to share it with you. And how can I have it in my phone? As I’m saying this goes ding. And it’s my sister. And she says, Did you know this existed? And it is a hotel in Miami on Ocean Drive. So right on the beach on that, like main drag?

And it’s called the Betsy, did you know about this, it’s a resort hotel, in Miami Beach. So here’s what I think of this. And when I work with my clients, I tell them to get the vision, get super clear on what you want. And then I want you to look for the birds. Now, this is what I mean, when you’re on a cruise ship. If you’ve never been on a cruise ship, you go up to the deck where the pools are and all that. And you can’t see land, like forever, right? It’s just ocean.

It’s a little disconcerting if you’re out there, and there’s nothing. And because there’s nothing there’s never any birds either, because there’s no land, right. But if you get up early, one day, on a day, you’re supposed to dock and you’re out there, and you still can’t see all you can see is ocean, and you’ve got your coffee, and you’re in a lawn chair, watching the sunrise and all of a sudden you start to see some birds, you still can’t see land, but you see birds and so you know you’re close. So that is what I call seeing a bird. And sometimes I call it a bluebird, I had a blue bird.

So

to me, we were talking about it, we were high vibe, we were on the resort review path. And my sister sent me that message and it was a bird. It was telling me it was like a god wink saying, hey, you’re on the right path, if this feels fun, who knows what it will turn into. But it is something. And so I tell you that story only because that might be a practice that you want to try. We do it sometime at the dinner table where we just start talking ridiculousness, but it’s so fun.

And then start to look for the birds. Because really, those are the crumbs, those are the things that start to lead you to the thing that you can take action on. Right. So what’s the action I can take? Well, I’m gonna reach out to the Betsy, I’m gonna ask them like, what are the things I would need to do at your hotel?

What are the what are the, you know, what are the restaurants I would need to go? And if I go to the restaurant, what do I need to order? What’s going to be the prettiest thing for me to share with my Instagram audience about your hotel? Do you see what I’m saying? So like, I’m being of service to them, it’s making it more fun for me.

And eventually, if I can develop this into something that really serves you guys, and serves me by being fun, and like exciting and beach like, then like everybody’s winning. And that’s when that’s when you that’s when you really live big, right? Like that’s where it all intersects. And it’s amazing. So start dreaming a little bit without any parameters and see what happens for you. Before I forget before I go, platform to profit, we are running, we are live, we are having such a good time.

If you are an entrepreneur, jump into my free Facebook group, you can get to it by going platform to profit.com. So I got a little techie you guys and I created that URL so it’s easy to get to. So platform to profit.com will bring you right to my Facebook group. And then if you want to go to my free training, you can just go to my website it’s Betsy Pake calm. You’ll see it right there on the front page, if you scroll down for for entrepreneurs and just click on that, and it’ll take you right to my masterclass.

So, all right. Now let’s go to the show. Welcome to the art of living big. I’m your host, Betsy Pake, and this podcast is designed to share interviews and new ideas to help you redefine what could be possible for your life. Now let’s go live big. Hey everybody, welcome to the show. All right. So today I actually already Had my topic picked out.

And what I wanted to talk to you about today. And then as I was waiting for my software to load so that I could record, I opened up Twitter. And I see this tweet that is like a story that someone’s posting. And I want to talk about it because it all connects and is actually like, a really interesting example of what I’m talking about. Okay, so here’s, here’s what I want to talk to you about.

Um, life is full of ups and downs. So things are never going to always be working out the way that you want. And sometimes it can feel really overwhelming. If you feel like things aren’t working in your favor, at all right? where you’re like, Holy smokes, it’s been three weeks, or it’s been two months, or it’s been two years, whatever it is, like, Oh, my gosh, I need a break.

How can this start to work? Why is this so hard? And it might be like, it might be your career, it might be a relationship, it might just be everything for everything feels off? Right? where you’re like, I’ve been working so hard for stuff. Like why does everything feel like such a drain? Right? Like, why is it so hard? And you know, I could start talking all about like mindset, and what we focus on is what we get, and I am a believer of all of that.

But if I’m keeping it tight, I’m going to tell you that I struggle sometimes just to contain my mindset if things are going badly. And so I’ll start to kind of go down the drain of like, why is this happening like this? This has been happening for too long, this keeps reoccurring? Is this a pattern like so my mind because I’m constantly trying to identify patterns and break patterns?

It almost it can sometimes be the, you know, where I have said recently, I just don’t want to learn and like I’m done growing, can I be done growing, I just want to be like, I just want to go and have fun. I just want to chill out like, sometimes when my brain is always trying to, like locate the pattern and see how I can grow from that how I can learn from that gets to be like sort of a lot, right? And even if you don’t do that, you know, maybe you’ve started doing that. And so that feels a little heavy to you.

But even if you don’t do that, like sometimes life just sucks, right? You know, I feel like 2019 is looking up for a lot of people. But I know a lot of people struggled in 2017 and 2018. And besides all the stuff going on in your regular life, there’s been a lot of just stuff going on in in the United States in society. And I can’t speak for other countries, but I’m sure that everybody’s has political things happening and, you know, environmental things happening and just like a lot of input, right?

So there’s a lot of things swirling about. And I found myself this past weekend, saying like something started going wrong, right, quote, unquote, going wrong. And I had that moment when I was like, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, we’re not, it’s not gonna go wrong, because I had 2019 or 2018. That was wrong, like a lot of things went wrong. So I’m like, I don’t know, we’re doing this is a good year, we’re gonna stay on this good path. And then I slowed down for just a minute.

And I thought, like, what if? What if what I’m struggling with is really the gift that I need to get me to where I’m going. So what if I’m struggling with something and when I learn how to figure it out, I actually can help somebody else or I can, I can be able to deal with a bigger thing that’s on its way. Like maybe this struggle isn’t some big like, catastrophe or the universe trying to screw me up. Maybe it’s like, hey, she’s got to grow. She’s got to build this muscle.

So let’s give her this and let her build the muscle. And then that way, she’ll be ready. Right? So that way, she’s aware and it’s growing and things are happening. And I think that when things go bad, we think, Oh my god, like the universe hates me, and I’m off my track. And how did this happen? Why is this happening to me? Right, why is this happening?

And I think if we can shift that just a little bit, and you know, I have a mindset coach also. And she said to me today we were talking about this very thing and I said about how sometimes things feel so dang hard. Like why is this feel so hard and She said, don’t move out of the struggle until you’ve found the gold. And I thought that was so smart.

Because what do we do? Like what do we do when we have struggle? And I am including myself in this. So I am not like saying, you guys do this, like I do this too. But what do we do? I feel struggle. What do I need?

I need a drink. I’m gonna go out a glass of wine tonight when I cook dinner, right? Or, we’re, I’m gonna go get some chocolate, what can I have for a snack? I need deserve a treat? Or I’m going to do some retail therapy.

Right? So it’s a way for me to push aside the struggle, and I get it. We all need, like emotional breaks, especially when big things are happening. But I’m wondering about myself, do I do that? So that I don’t have to deal with the struggle? But am I missing the gold in that? S

o am I missing the thing that could really, really help me to not only move out of this, but help make me stronger? Okay, so then this is where I’m going. Now, I almost hesitate to bring this thing that I saw on Twitter into it, because I am not saying that my life is comparable to this. I’m not saying my issues are comparable to this.

I’m not saying like, what I’m about to tell you is like freaking her rendus I am not like, yes. Okay, so you get me. But what they found was and what I saw was Blum Bloomberg opinion, posted that Holocaust survivors had more health problems, which totally makes sense, right? Because when you’ve lived through something horrendous like that, that you’d have more instance, you know, such a stressful thing on your body. But they had more health problems, but they lived longer than their contemporaries.

So they found that the effect of living a surviving the Holocaust, or a POW camp on future life expectancy is more complicated than you might have originally thought. So living through a horrendous event, like confinement in a concentration camp, or a prisoner of war, cold war camp creates health problems. But those who survive also seem to have other characteristics that tend to make people live longer. The resilience effect can also overcome scarring. I thought this was so incredibly interesting, because and I’ll say it again.

So don’t ask me prove it. I’m not saying that my situation is the same at all. But I also can have, I can overcome stuff in my own life, that can help me to become resilient that can help me develop resilience in my life that I may not have had without that struggle.

And so in that perspective, if I’m looking at things from that perspective, then when something starts to go wrong, can I instead of going, Oh, my God, if this is going wrong, and the things in our life are not like being in a pow, like I get it, but like if the things in our life when something starts to go wrong, you know, can we can we shift that and go, Wait a second, this is really good. Because this is helping me develop a muscle I haven’t had yet.

Because if I had the muscle, I wouldn’t be in this situation, right? So if I knew what to do, I wouldn’t have gotten here. But I’m here. So what can I learn from this? How can I get better? Like, what are the different ways to see this? And when you start asking those kinds of questions, it changes the way your brain starts to process things.

So instead of going, Oh, my gosh, I can’t believe this has happened. What if What if you said, Oh, my gosh, how can I make this better? Right? That’s a totally different question to ask, or Oh, my gosh, what could I learn from this? How could I shift this? How does what’s happening to me? How can I zoom out? Instead of putting the spotlight on this one particular problem?

Can I zoom way out? And can I see the entire like stage and the whole stage of my life and go Wait a second, I can see how this could really fit in. If I could figure this out. I could be in a much better position to do something else. Right. So like, and I have not even thought through this. So I’m just saying it as I’m thinking but like, you know, I talk all the time about wanting to go to the beach. Like it’s probably annoying how much I talk about it. But you know, it’s something that I have had in my craw for a long time.

And I think that in a lot of ways it was my representation of my future as opposed to like actually going to the beach, although I do love to go to the beach, but it is this representation of freedom. representation of like carefree. Now, if you follow along on the show, you know that I had a really difficult time the past few years with my daughter being sick, right? So it would make sense that I would create a vision of something that would feel better, right? So it became the thing that would feel better the thing that represented freedom and healing. And if I was able to do that, then my life would be different, right?

So what if now as I’m like, I’ve gone through all of this stuff, and now I’m here in this moment. And I can say, okay, when things come up, how can I shift that? How could I use what I have overcome over the past few years to overcome this? Like, what are the skills I learned? What is what did I? How was I resilient? And how can I draw upon that, and you have these things to write.

So you have things that you’ve been going through or things that you’ve overcome, you probably had a representation for how it would feel when it was better, right? And maybe that’s in your life now, or maybe it’s not, but you you, you’ve come to a place where now you’re standing here, you may have other problems, you may still be working through it.

But can you zoom way back and look at the whole stage, and say, This is actually a key component in me, building my resilience, so that I am better able to do this thing, right? So, you know, the life of an entrepreneur as me like, there’s ups and downs all the time, there’s things to overcome. There’s, there’s spaces where I have to learn to shift, and, and, you know, see things differently.

And all of that, that I’ve been through created the resilience so that I could get here and that I could find a new way to do things if things weren’t working out, right, so that I could have the mindset to keep going. The only difference, the only thing that’s stopping you from getting to your beach is just that maybe you went out I guess I’m not supposed to go to the beach anyway.

Right? Or I guess that’s not for me. But what if it is, and what if the struggle you’re going through right now, is something that you’ve got to learn so that you can create the life you want that will get you to your beach, or to your end goal or to your

perfect big life?

So I share all that with you. Because maybe we need to adjust how we’re looking at struggles. And I know I work with a lot of clients, one on one, not just in my my platform to profit program, but also one on one. And you know, everybody struggles from time to time. And sometimes I see them struggling and in how can you shift that so that you’re not in the depths of it.

But you’re rising out, and you can see how it can help you to overcome. So one thing is to just write all the great things about where you’re going, just make a big huge list, right? Like, where am I going and what’s great about it, because where you’re putting your attention is where that energy is going to go. So can you shift your energy out of the dumps,

and into something that you do want.

I have written literally books and books, notebooks full of what it’s going to be like when I get to the beach, because when things were going really bad and things were really a struggle with my daughter, I would grab a pen and a notebook, and I would just write about the beach.

And it would shift my perspective, it would shift my energy, it would give me the resilience that would give me hope that I needed. So where do you need hope? And can you focus on something else, I’m not saying you’re not going to feel bad from time to time, or you’re not going to have struggles, but use those struggles.

Don’t leave the struggle until you found the gift. Focus on what you want. write it all out, focus, focus, focus, and see if you can start to turn some of that yuck into something that actually gives you the resilience where not only do you thrive and build the life you really want, but maybe you even live longer.

So

leave you with that little thought for this week. And also, before I go, I think we’re gonna be doing two a week. So one of the ideas that we had was to a week because I’ve got other things to say and I know that some of my shows have been a little bit shorter as I’m not interviewing people. And so so here so we’re here and it’s like a Monday afternoon that I’m recording this but maybe you’ll see me again on Friday. So keep your ears open for that.

Thank you so much for listening to the show for sharing it with your friends screenshot this for me if you would and let me know if you got any distinction from it at all tagged me on facebook in your stories or, or on Instagram and your stories. And let me know what you think and how you enjoyed it because I want to connect with you and I want to be able To find you, and if you’re an entrepreneur, jump in on Facebook join us by going platform to profit.

And I go live in there a couple times a week to so we can connect on a deeper level inside, inside that Facebook group. So thanks everybody so much for listening. You guys go out and have a great week. And always, as always, here’s the little message from my husband.

That’s it.

HI, I'M YOUR HOST

Meet Betsy!

I'm Betsy Pake!

*Ocean obsessed

*Probably hanging out with my dogs

*Optimist

*Deep thinker

Hey There!

About Betsy

Hi I’m Betsy and I’m a subconscious change expert.
By day you can find me digging deep into the unconscious beliefs and identity of my clients so they can move past self-sabotage and lack of confidence and gain traction in their career and life.